Watch for: October personal income (8:30 a.m. Eastern Time): seen rising 0.2% after rising 0.4% a month earlier. October consumer spending (8:30): seen unchanged after rising 0.8% in September. November Chicago PMI (9:45): seen at 50.3 after coming in at 49.9 a month earlier.

Earnings: Frontline, Genesco, ReneSola, Whitewave Foods

For more MarketBeat and other streaming markets coverage from The Wall Street Journal, point your mobile browser to wsj.com/marketspulse.

The Breakfast Briefing

Investors searching for clues on where stocks are headed next are honing in on one pocket of the market: the tech sector.

The tech-heavy Nadaq Composite has risen in eight of the last nine trading days, leading a broad market revival following the post-election selloff.

This year, tech has generally paced the market’s moves in both directions, albeit in a more exaggerated fashion. After reaching a 12-year high in mid-September, the Nasdaq dipped 11% in less than two months. In the same time frame, the Dow and S&P 500 each dropped 7%.

Since Nov. 15, however, the Nasdaq has moved up more than 6%, outperforming the Dow’s 3.8% gain and the S&P 500’s 4.6% rise.

“Tech tends to overshoot on both the upside and the downside, but people are starting to come back to it,” says Matt Peron, who leads actively managed equity investing at Northern Trust’s asset management unit.

“Tech is still a secular growth story,” he said. “It’s not surprising to see downdrafts being used as buying opportunities.”

Apple Inc., the world’s biggest company by market value, is leading the latest run-up. The technology juggernaut has risen 12% in the last two weeks, after falling 25% in less than two months.

Other beaten-down tech names have also participated in the recent rally. In November, Facebook is up 29%, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is up 46% and Qualcomm is up 8.1%.

Analysts say tech still might have more room to run higher heading into the end of the year. Despite the most recent rally, the S&P 500′s tech sector is still down 5.3% over the last three months, the worst performer of the index’s 10 large-cap sectors.

Cliff Notes: Late Thursday, President Barack Obama laid out his opening position in the fiscal-cliff negotiations. The president called for a $1.6 trillion tax increase, a $50 billion economic-stimulus program and new power to raise the federal debt limit. Those parameters were quickly viewed by Republicans as a step back in talks.

“No substantive progress has been made in the talks between the White House and the House over the last two weeks,” said House Speaker John Boehner.

Let the wrangling continue.

Morning MarketBeat Daily Factoid: On this day in 1979, Pink Floyd released the album “The Wall.”

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